I remember it like it was yesterday. Last Christmas, after a substantial weight loss journey for both of us, I surprised my husband with
Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, Rip Esselstyn’s The Engine 2 Diet, Julieanna Hever, M.S., R.D., CPT The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, The Forks Over Knives Companion Book, and Kathy Hester’s The Vegan Slow Cooker. After reading Dr. Esselstyn’s & Rip Esselstyn’s books, my husband, Bill, turned to me and said, “I’m going vegan. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I am. I’m starting now.” I about choked! We had just “come out” as vegetarian, but this was different. This was really radical. Go without cheese?? And ice cream and pudding? I shakily said, “OK. If you are, I am too.” Gulp!

Then, we watched Dr. Robert Lustig’s The Bitter Truth About Sugar

We had already been following the Rule of 5 from You on a Diet by Michael F. Roizen, MD and Mehmet C. Oz, MD, one of which was no high fructose corn syrup, but now we cut out any kind of added sugar.

We are also learning about GMO’s and trying to cut them out of our diet. Pretty hard when there is currently no labeling. We definitely are supporting legislation to have all food that has GMO’s in them to be labeled.
What a great year it’s been. It hasn’t been hard. We just armed ourselves with knowlege about the effects of dairy and used vegan cookbooks. We discovered great new flavors, spices and ways of cooking. No meat, no dairy, no added oil and no added sugar. Our palates have really grown.

Neil Armstrong, who made the “giant leap for mankind” as the first human to set foot on the moon, died on Saturday, August 25, 2012. The cause of death according to his family was “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.” He had just celebrated his 82nd birthday when he went to the hospital on Monday, August 6, 2012 for a cardiac stress test. He flunked, and on Tuesday surgeons bypassed four blockages in his coronary arteries. This limited information from the media is enough for me to conclude that his death was avoidable; he should have never been operated on. His doctors gambled and we lost an American hero.

The first successful bypass operation was performed in America at the Cleveland Clinic on May 9, 1967, about two years before Mr. Armstrong’s history-making step on the moon on July 20, 1969. Until the mid-1980s, octogenarians (people in their eighties) were spared from heart bypass surgery because the elderly are generally less able to withstand the rigors of extracorporeal circulation (the heart-lung machine) and the many hours of major surgery, than are younger patients. Plus, the life expectancy of people having reached the age of 80 years is limited. Yet, there is the economic side of this equation: doctors and hospitals have increasingly appreciated the market potential of this age group and as a result, have published multiple papers in an attempt to justify taking extreme risks with the elderly.

Open Heart Surgery Does Not Save Lives

There are two indications for heart surgery:

1) To relieve incapacitating chest pain (angina) that is not sufficiently reduced by “good medical therapy.” In standard medical practice, this means giving anti-angina medications like nitrates and beta-blockers. But truly “good medical therapy” must also routinely include a low-fat diet since the frequency of angina episodes is reduced by more than 90% in fewer than three weeks with this simple, safe approach. As an added benefit, this same low-fat diet heals (reverses) the underlying artery disease. A symptom-relieving indication for heart surgery appears to be absent in Mr. Armstrong’s case. He simply had the misfortune to step on a cardiac treadmill machine as part of a routine check up.

2) To save lives. According to the article “Is Heart Surgery Worth It?” in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Except in a minority of patients with severe disease, bypass operations don’t prolong life or prevent future heart attacks,” Even after massaging the data, the survival benefits are barely perceptible: A recent analysis of 28 studies comparing heart surgery with medical therapy, performed by doctors with a vested interest (cardiologists and bypass surgeons), found less than a 2% absolute improvement in survival achieved from heart surgery over no operation. These conclusions are based on relatively young patients. Sadly, the case for octogenarians is much more disappointing.

Multiple studies, performed by researchers, most interested in justifying bypass surgery, have confirmed the higher risks of complications (bleeding, kidney failure, etc.), death, and prolonged hospitalization in octogenarians. An octogenarians’ 30-daymortality rate is 9% compared to 1.2% in the younger group. Surgeons from the same city where Mr. Armstrong died, Cincinnati, know these dismal results as well. J. Michael Smith, M.D., director of surgical research, Good Samaritan Hospital, wrote about his study, “Octogenarians had a 72 percent higher risk of death, 3 percent longer hospitalization, a 51 percent higher risk for neurological complications and were 49 percent more likely to undergo repeat surgery for bleeding…. On the plus side, surgery can improve quality of life, including such symptoms as shortness of breath and chest pain, even in octogenarians. On the other hand, it’s hard to make the argument that you will prolong anyone’s life this way.”

The reason heart surgery (both bypass surgery and angioplasty) fails to save lives is that the targets of the operators are the hard, fibrous, stable, non-lethal plaques, not the volatile small plaques found inside the arteries that rupture and cause heart attacks and death.

Good Can Come from a Hero’s Death

From all accounts Neal Armstrong was strong and healthy with many good years ahead for him. That is before he stepped on the treadmill, which in his case served as the conveyor belt to the operating room, and beyond. His former doctors undoubtedly have regret for their decisions, but not enough to change their ways. They owe the world an explanation for their actions in light of common knowledge held for more than two decades about the extreme risks of lucrative heart surgery in octogenarians. Likely, they will remain silent, continuing to make obscene profits at all costs. (The average annual salary of a bypass surgeon is $533,084.) Let’s hope that this one small step for (a) man will become one giant leap for mankind by publicizing this kind of unconscionable care. No one is immune from these everyday medical practices as Neil Armstrong’s untimely end demonstrates. And let’s dream beyond the moon, hoping that someday soon patients will be offered a time-honored, safe, cost-free, highly effective dietary approach to their health problems.

(Although the kind of stress test used for Neil Armstrong was not identified, the use of a walking treadmill to stress the heart is most commonly employed. If positive, then an angiogram is performed to identify the anatomy of the specific blockages. The angiogram serves as a preoperative test.)

A high-protein diet might benefit health in some ways, but depending on what kind of protein a person consumes, it could raise their stroke risk too, suggests a large new study that finds eating lots of red meat ups the likelihood of having a stroke while poultry lowers it.

“The main message from this paper is that the type of protein or the protein package is really important for the risk of stroke. We have to consider protein in the context of the foods,” said Dr. Frank Hu, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study.

He and his colleagues collected data from two massive health surveys that tracked tens of thousands of men and women from roughly middle age to their senior and elderly years.

Over 20-some years of the study, nearly 1,400 men and more than 2,600 women had a stroke.

Caused by a blood clot or a burst blood vessel that stops blood flow to the brain, stroke is the third most common cause of death in the United States. Twenty-six out of every 1,000 people in the U.S. have experienced a stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 800,000 die of stroke each year.

To see what influence different types of dietary protein have on stroke risk, the researchers divided up the people in the study based on how much red meat, poultry, fish, dairy and other sources of protein they typically ate each day.

Men who ate more than two servings of red meat each day — which was at the high end of the meat eaters — had a 28 percent increased risk of stroke compared to men who averaged about a third of a serving of red meat each day, the low end of the red meat eaters.

The researchers considered a serving of red meat as four to six ounces of beef or a hamburger patty.

Women who ate nearly two servings of red meat a day had a 19 percent higher risk of stroke than women who ate less than half a serving each day.

A 19 percent increase in stroke risk means that instead of 26 out of every 1,000 people having a stroke, 31 out of every 1,000 people would have one.

The researchers also looked at the change in stroke risk that would come with substituting different forms of protein for one daily serving of red meat: swapping in one serving a day of poultry lowered stroke risk by 27 percent, a serving of nuts or fish was linked to a 17 percent drop in risk and a serving of dairy dropped the risk by 10 to 11 percent.

Dr. Adam Bernstein, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, said he was not surprised to see that red meat eaters suffer more strokes.

“We’ve also done work on red meat and diabetes and red meat and coronary heart disease. So it makes sense that these cardio-metabolic diseases are grouped together,” Bernstein told Reuters Health.

An earlier study, led by Susanna Larsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, also found that eating red meat had a link to stroke risk (see Reuters Health story of December 31, 2010).

What was new in the current study, Larsson said, was that frequent poultry eaters showed a lowered risk of stroke.

People who ate the most chicken or turkey each day — about a half serving for women and three-quarters of a serving for men — had a 13 percent reduced risk of stroke compared to those who ate barely more than a serving a day.

One serving was considered four ounces.

“I do not think that poultry has been considered as a protein source that might lower the risk of stroke. This is new,” Larsson told Reuters Health in an email.

Also surprising in the study was that fish seemed to offer no protection against stroke.

Larsson pointed out that earlier work has found fewer strokes among groups who eat fish often.

It’s possible that the benefits of fish depend on how it’s served, Bernstein said.

“There’s a lot of variation in how people cook and prepare fish, and we couldn’t get down to that level,” he said.

The researchers didn’t prove that beef is to blame for the increased number of strokes, but Bernstein said it could be that the fat and iron in red meat play a role.

Larsson said the findings support current recommendations to limit how much red meat people eat, and to opt for chicken and fish instead.